1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a content item recommendation device and a content item recommendation method for detecting content items highly related to the content item being viewed by a user and recommending the content items to the user, for example.
2. Related Art
In recent years, the number of channels of digital broadcasting such as CATV and CS broadcasting has been increasing and the variety of the content items viewable for a user has been considerably increasing. In such a trend, services for generating content items by using the resources on the Internet are provided. Accordingly, the user is required to select a content item to his/her liking from enormous number of content items provided through these services.
However, the increase in the number of selectable content items in these services makes it complicated or difficult for the user to select the content item to his/her liking. Accordingly, attention is focused on systems for helping the user to select the content item by recommending content items. There is a technique in which the viewing history of the user is used to recommend content items. In this technique, the user viewing a content item is recommended to other content items based on the searched viewing histories of the other users which have viewed the same content item (see JP-A 2007-324874 (Kokai)).
As stated above, attention is focused on the techniques for recommending content items, and there is a technique for recommending content items by using the viewing histories of the users. However, in such a conventional technique using the viewing histories, recommendation cannot be made when the viewing histories are not sufficiently accumulated. Therefore, it is difficult to let the user select a content item to his/her liking when the operation of a service for distributing content items is in an initial stage and no or few viewing histories are accumulated.